ENISA’s Annual Incidents report provides an aggregated analysis of incidents affecting the availability of services reported to ENISA and the European Commission under Article 13a, by the National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) of the different EU Member States. Most incidents reported in 2016 involved mobile Internet and mobile telephony connections, while the longest lasting incidents were caused, for the first time, by malware.
During 2016 ENISA and the European Commission received 158 incident reports from NRAs regarding severe outages in the EU’s electronic communication networks and/or services. In total 24 countries, including two EFTA countries, reported significant incidents, while six countries reported they had no significant incidents. In general, there was a slight increase compared to last year’s statistics where reported incidents reached a total number of 138 incident reports.
Key findings from this year’s report include:
- Mobile Internet continues to be the most affected service: in 2016 mobile Internet accounted for 48 percent of all reported incidents.
- System failures are the dominant root cause of incidents: most incidents were caused by system failures or technical failures (almost 73 percent of the incidents) as a root cause.
- Malware is causing increasingly long-lasting incidents: incidents caused by malware, although few in number, had most impact in terms of duration and user hours lost.
- Emergency services are affected by incidents: 20 percent of the reported incidents affected the 112 emergency services number provision.
- Third party failures: 21.5 percent of all incidents were caused by third party failures, a significant increase from 2015 (15.2 percent).
